If you’ve ever felt guilty at not ‘eating seasonally’… if you’ve ever wondered whether Jamie Oliver’s kids crave burgers and chips… if you’ve tried Growing Your Own but just got bored… this book may be for you.

And I need your help to decide whether to publish.

I wrote an article about my eco-freaky childhood for the Guardian’s “Experience” column. People kept telling me I should write the whole story – so I have. What I want to know now though is whether I should invest in actually printing it.

What's it about?
I was three when my father quit his job at a London ad agency to chase the 70s self-sufficiency dream. Family legend has it he had his midlife-crisis moment in a railway station WH Smith. He read a book about green economics and came home ready to sell up and leave the rat race straight away.
The original plan was to convert an old watermill so we could generate our own electricity, but what we could actually afford was a bungalow on just under an acre of land in west Oxfordshire. Neither of my parents had farmed before - they had both lived in cities for most of their lives - and it wasn't so much a farm they had bought themselves as a large garden. But, undaunted, we dug up the garden for vegetables and got ourselves half a dozen hens, a hive of bees, a cat and (of course) that cow.

I express sincere gratefulness for your devoted?inspiring assitance, but most significantly, for new friendship.

This book doesn't tell you how to live the green dream, but it makes you feel less guilty when you don't. It's about what it's like to be a kid in the middle of a slightly wonky back-to-the-land experiment. Often very surreal, sometimes very funny, basically growing up in The Good Life, only without Felicity Kendal's bottom (sorry).